The President's Professor

"I'm a very unambitious man. I have no longing for power and no lifelong project. All my life I've studied things that interest me. My children make fun of me. They ask me what I plan to do when I grow up. But I've just followed the breeze, and it's blown me in several interesting directions."

The speaker may sound like an aging flower child, but he is Political Scientist Robert Allen Goldwin, 52, and last December an obliging breeze blew him into one of the most interesting and challenging spots in the world: the White House. As a special consultant to President Ford and a member of the Domestic Council, Goldwin serves as the Administration's link with the nation's community of scholars and thinkers. At a time when complex problems cry out for solution, he is Ford's reconnaissance man, looking for promising new ideas.

One way Goldwin goes about this is to arrange small White House lunches and dinners during which Ford and his top aides can drink in the views of eminent intellectuals (TIME, Dec. 23). At the third such session last Saturday, Ford conferred informally with four people of diverse interests: Thomas Sowell, a black U.C.L.A. economist, author of a forthcoming book on race and economics; Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor of history at the City University of New York; Edward Banfield, a specialist in urban affairs who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote the iconoclastic The Unheavenly City; and Herbert Storing, a University of Chicago political scientist and expert on the founding fathers.

Goldwin screens his potential guest stars as carefully as a pro football scout checks out college gridiron talent. Be fore each meeting he painstakingly explores possible avenues of conversation with each participant, managing in the end to ensure that thinkers with various viewpoints will speak to the same issue. Goldwin puts a premium on spontaneity but sometimes fears that the academics will waste the President's time with trivia. In preparation for the first dinner-seminar he held, he spent at least five hours with each guest and bluntly informed them that he considered some of their ideas peripheral.

The meetings and guest list are usually not advertised, the better to promote frank exchanges. But Goldwin has more practical objectives than simply fostering sprightly or even inspiring talk. He sifts each discussion, hoping to find grist for policy proposals. The morning after the December dinner, he sent some of the guests' observations on crime to the Domestic Council. Two weeks later Ford agreed to use several of the ideas in a forthcoming message to Congress. "A lot of those ideas were generated by Goldwin's planning," says James Cavanaugh, deputy director of the Domestic Council's staff.

Window Dressing. On trips round the country, Goldwin collects a variety of scholarly papers on domestic issues and passes many of them along to the council for consideration. A man of remarkable energy, Goldwin also serves Ford as a talent scout and sometime speech writer, helps the Office of Public Liaison set up its "field conferences" with the public, and acts as one White House link with Jewish organizations. He also represents the interests of the arts and humanities to the President; he recently arranged a White House meeting for spokesmen for higher education who were eager to make their resources available for federal programs.

Goldwin abhors the term intellectual-in-residence and with good reason: the scholars burdened in the past by that cumbersome mantle had frequently found themselves useless window dressing for the White House staff. Lyndon Johnson, for example, had little respect for his resident sage Eric Goldman, commenting on several occasions that the Princeton historian was only around "to please the intellectuals."

Ford's professor, in fact, professes no particular ideology, though he is a Republican, and chooses not to whisper his own views into the President's ear. "The cause I push is a kind of elevated common sense," he says. Goldwin prefers to act as distiller and conveyor of the ideas of others. He has good credentials for that role. A native New Yorker who fought with the U.S. Cavalry in World War II, Goldwin graduated in 1950 from St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. He spent the next nine years editing reading materials and training discussion leaders at the American Foundation for Continuing Education.

Skilled Moderator. Along the way he met a Bell & Howell executive named Charles Percy, whom he tutored privately in political philosophy; Goldwin later served as a campaign consultant when Percy ran successfully for the Senate. Goldwin earned his master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago and from 1960 to 1966 ran a series of wide-ranging political-science seminars at its Public Affairs Conference Center. Among the scholars, journalists, businessmen and politicians in sometime attendance were Congressmen Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld. When Goldwin moved to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, as an associate professor, he took the Conference Center with him. In 1969 he was made dean of St. John's and the next year spent his spare time teaching Plato's Republic to Congressmen and other notable Washingtonians, each of whom gave a lecture at the college as payment in kind. Later, Goldwin held a class for capital journalists on the writings of John Locke, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation. Says Washington Post Columnist David Broder, an alumnus of several Goldwin seminars: "He is the most skilled moderator or discussion manager I've ever seen."

In 1973 Rumsfeld, then Ambassador to NATO, beckoned Goldwin to Brussels to lend a hand. There the professor contributed to drafting the Ottawa Declaration, which reaffirmed the Atlantic Alliance. When Rumsfeld joined Ford's White House as chief of staff, he persuaded Goldwin to turn down a faculty job at the University of Pennsylvania and follow him.

A soft-spoken father of four and a man of modest taste--he has not bought a suit in five years--Goldwin is also self-effacing about his academic achievements. "Goldman and [Arthur] Schlesinger were academic stars. I'm not a scholar in that class. Most of the work I've done has been an attempt to build a bridge between scholars and people with heavy public responsibilities. But there's an art to that."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.